‘Renoir painting’ bought for $50 in a Virginia flea market may fetch $100,000 in auction (Photo)

The Potomack Company Auctions and Appraisals will be selling a painting of French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as shown in the photo below later this month, and could be sold for $100,000; but was bought for only less than $50 in a Virginia flea market more than a year ago.

According to the New York Times on Friday, September 7, 2012, an unidentified woman bought a small box lot in a flea market in Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, and later did she realized that there was a painting inside which antique experts believed to be “Paysage Bords De Seine,” an 1870 Renoir painting.

As noted in the report, the woman was about to tear the paper since it was only the frame that she likes to keep, but her mother advised her to bring it first to painting to experts because it might be worthy. She placed it on a white plastic bag and brought it to The Potomack Company, and was surprised on what she learned.

“You just see it and you know it’s right,” Anne Norton Craner, Potomack‘s fine arts specialist and a former research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was quoted in the report, noting that she is very much convinced that it was the “Paysage Bords De Seine” painting.

Mrs. Craner added that the 5.5 inches by 9 inches painting was purchased from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in France in 1925 but was later sold to Herbert May, the husband of Sadie A. May, who is a well-known collector in Maryland and has donated a lot of works to the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“I’m sure that whoever buys it will treat it the way it deserves to be treated. I’m just glad I didn’t sell it at one of my yard sales,” the ‘Renoir woman’ was quoted telling to The Huffington Post via phone interview, with the painting to be sold at The Potomack Company auction on September 29, 2012.